My Plastic Brain Page 7

  On the other hand, there is no denying that there is a huge amount of evidence that meditation provides just the right kinds of changes that would be helpful for anyone seeking better attentional control, and to rein in a panic-prone mind. Recent studies have found that mindfulness meditation changes the way that the default-mode (mind-wandering) network is wired in to the executive control networks, presumably doing something similar to what Joe's training did—or would do if I kept it up long term. That sounds like something worth pursuing.

  Another recent study also found that strengthening the frontal control networks gave people more of a handle on their emotional responses, which made them better able to cope with stress. This in turn seemed to reduce certain immune molecules in the body that are in charge of inflammation—something that should be kept to a minimum, for both body and mind.6

  So here I am, in a church hall in my hometown with seven strangers (thankfully, since I was dreading bumping into someone I knew) and Gill Johnson, a mindfulness teacher who has done workshops with the mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn. Kabat-Zinn was a young biology researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center when he brought mindfulness to the masses by rebranding it as a stress-reduction technique in the late 1970s. Since then, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) has become a global brand, and if you think you don’t know anyone who does it, you probably do but they are keeping it quiet. So here goes.

  Thankfully, Gill isn’t afflicted by the “look.” She is warm and down-to-earth and undoubtedly very chilled. In place of the look is an unwavering gaze that makes me feel as if she knows all about me already. And she can rock a jumpsuit, cardigan, and slippers like no one I have ever met. “This is meditation—we need to be comfortable,” she says with a grin.

  As we wait for a few latecomers, Gill says we should “sit with how that feels.” I think “sit with how that feels” might be a phrase she uses a lot, and I think I might find it a bit annoying. What if I don’t want to sit with feeling impatient? What if I want to huff and puff and fidget while getting more and more annoyed? Actually, I wasn’t annoyed about the latecomers but was feeling very uncomfortable about the whole “being in a room full of strangers” thing. Feels a bit like a therapy group or something….

  Finally, we get going on an icebreaker, which is clearly designed for the skeptics in the room. We are to close our eyes and imagine holding a lemon, how it feels in our hands. Then we are to bring it up to our noses and smell it (am I imagining it or did I just smell lemon?). Then, finally, we take a big bite out of it, the juice running all over our chins and hands. Instantly, I’m salivating. It's quite a cool demonstration—I had expected to imagine tasting it, but not for my body to react as if I had. That's obviously the point: your mind makes things happen in your body, so be careful what you let your mind do….

  After a few more exercises, including mindfully eating a raisin (raisins taste like grapes when you stop to chew them—who knew?), we end the session with a body scan. This involves checking in with various body parts while lying on a mat on the floor. I spend most of the thirty minutes asleep, briefly wake up to realize that I should be focusing on a certain bit of my body and that I feel cold lying on the floor, and then drop off again.

  So far, I’m not sold. I find the session frustrating in the same way I found Pilates frustrating: you just don’t seem to do very much. I walk home with a slight headache and feel lethargic. And I find myself in a bit of a bad mood for the rest of the day. I get virtually no work done—which is annoying because part of the point of this is to help me focus. I’ve read the research; I know this is meant to be very good for my brain. I’m just not sure I like it.

  INTERVIEWS/CONVERSATIONS:

  Mike Esterman and Joe DeGutis, interview during lab visit, June 15–22, 2014.

  Joe DeGutis, email conversation, April 24, 2014.

  Sara Lazar, interview at Harvard University, June 19, 2014.

  Gill Johnson, conversation as part of meditation course, September 24–November 12, 2015.

  The assumptions you don’t know you’re making will only get you into trouble and confusion.

  —Douglas Adams

  “I’d like you to think of something that you worry about often,” says Alex Temple-McCune, a baby-faced PhD student with the air of a much older, kindly doctor.

  “Oh, that's easy. My son running into the road outside my house,” I reply. Alex stares at me, impassive. “He's five,” I add, by way of explanation. “It's a very busy road.”

  He nods, slowly. “Okay, I am going to leave the room for five minutes, and I’d like you to worry about that for the whole time I am gone. Think about it in as much detail as you can, and try not to think about anything else.”

  Oh God.

  “This is going to be horrible!” I plead, feeling my eyes widen as Alex gets up to leave. He hesitates at the door but goes out anyway, leaving me alone in a sparse, white, windowless room to think, in horrifying detail, about the worst thing that could happen in my life.

  I am here at Oxford University to take part in a study into the cognitive basis of worrying, in the lab of Professor Elaine Fox. I’ve taken all the necessary screening tests to confirm that I am, indeed, a frequent worrier—and over the next two weeks the plan is to try and rectify that with a training course, designed to change the way the brain deals with stress.

  After my success in Boston, changing this particular feature of my brain is very much next on the list. It seems to be one of the areas where there is pretty good evidence that you can, with a bit of effort, make real changes to your brain. There has been a good fifteen years’ worth of work in this area because worrying too much is not only bad for sustaining focus, but it is also seriously bad for your health.

  Here's a statistic that worriers everywhere will enjoy: persistent worrying—even low-level fretting that doesn’t qualify as a proper anxiety disorder—makes you 29 percent more likely to die of a heart attack and 41 percent more likely to die of cancer. In fact, according to the study of eight thousand people that generated these figures, worrying a lot makes you more likely to die of anything, and the bigger the daily dose of stress, the greater the risk.1

  I can’t help thinking that if my friend Jolyon hadn’t spent his twenties and thirties enjoying a totally debauched lifestyle, he’d probably live forever. Because Jolyon never, ever, worries. While I have been getting my knickers in a twist over various incarnations of this book, he has formed a company, launched two successful brands, and made several million pounds. He named the company “Gusto” for good reason—this is a man who never does anything by halves and couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about him while he's doing it. You could say that he doesn’t even worry when he probably should: he launched Gusto while his partner was pregnant with their first child, giving up a highly paid, steady job that he was very good at, and putting all of their financial security on the line to do so. If it failed, as he cheerfully told me most businesses do, they would find themselves broke, with a newborn and nowhere to live. It was touch and go during the first few months, but he never really believed that it wouldn’t work. “I lost thirty thousand pounds on one day when I first started,” he told me. “It just made me more determined to make it back.”

  It's the same story you hear over and over again about plucky overachievers: they don’t get bogged down by what could go wrong or what just did go wrong; they just dig in and get on with it. It must be a really nice way to live.

  Then there is the fact that anxiety is really bad for pretty much any kind of thinking. It not only narrows focus, but it reduces impulse control and robs the brain of processing power that could better be used for other things. Over time, it has been found to shrink the hippocampus, a crucial brain area for memory. There has been some evidence unearthed recently that having an anxious temperament has some benefits, such as making a person more empathic and quicker to respond in a crisis—but overall it's not a great state to be in if you want to g
et the best out of your brain.

  Some scientists—including Elaine Fox and her team at Oxford—think that differences between the likes of Jolyon and the likes of me come down to basic differences in the way our brains process information about the world around us. In her research, and in her 2012 book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, Fox argues that it all comes down to the balance between two of the most ancient and powerful circuits in the brain—one responsible for seeking out danger and the other for spotting potential rewards—and how well connected they are to the newer, thinking, bits of the brain. A skew to one way or the other is known as a cognitive bias—in other words, an assumption we don’t know we are making. The direction and strength of these cognitive biases, Fox says, make us who we are—whether that is a driven and confident risk-taker like Jolyon, or more of a reticent worrier like me.

  So again it all seems to come down to what we do with our limited budget of attention. Unlike the deliberate focus I was working on in Boston, though, this is an automatic kind of attention that operates within milliseconds, directing your focus to whichever parts of your surroundings seem particularly important. Crucially, all of this happens before we are consciously aware of noticing anything, and that means that, although we don’t realize it, our conscious mind is constantly being fed a fundamentally skewed view of the world. This makes it particularly challenging to control. How can you change something that you’re not even aware you are doing?

  A negative cognitive bias might not be very good for you, but it undoubtedly evolved for good reason: it came in handy in the days when we were at the mercy of large, toothy predators and men with clubs because it drastically cuts down processing time in the brain when we need to move fast. The downside is that the unconscious nature of these biases means that we live under the illusion that our own impression of the world—whether it is fundamentally safe or to be fretted about at every opportunity—is a totally accurate window on reality, when it is actually anything but. And that means that if you want to change your outlook on life—say, if you don’t like the idea of hurtling, gray-haired and haggard, to an early grave—it isn’t an easy thing to do.

  On the plus side, the laws of neuroplasticity aren’t swayed by a little thing like the border between unconscious and conscious processing, and Fox and others are working on finding ways to nudge troublesome cognitive biases back in a more positive direction. It sounds like something that is definitely worth a try, especially because some research suggests that all you need to do to retrain your cognitive bias toward a rosy view of life is to play a computer game for a few minutes every day.

  It's a controversial area of research, and not everyone is convinced that it works, but it resonates with me partly because it treats an anxious temperament not as a fundamental part of who you are but as a kind of system error in the brain. And I get that because if I’m really honest about it, my main problem with all this worrying is that it really isn’t me. Outwardly, I’m quite a risk-taker (freelance journalism isn’t for softies), and most people would probably describe me as mostly upbeat. The other day, another mother at the school gate described me as a “super mum,” and I don’t even think she was being sarcastic. So clearly I give off the impression that I have things pretty much under control. Only I know about all of the negative chuntering, worrying, and general unease that goes on under the surface, and that, frankly, gets on my nerves.

  Earlier, in Boston (in chapter one), I found out that I score highly on a measure of trait anxiety (also known as neuroticism, which seems a bit harsh), and research has shown that people like me, who score high on this measure, tend to have a negative cognitive bias, which we use to subconsciously scan the environment for threats at all times. We are also more likely to get stuck in threat-obsessing mode, assessing and reassessing a situation in pessimistic terms and getting progressively more worried. And yes, I do both of these things. The first of them, threat readiness, is pretty understandable, I think. When I was nineteen, my father was killed in a car accident. In the twenty-odd years since then, I have perfected a kind of 360-degree, all-seeing eye for danger—especially the randomly occurring kind that could take a loved one away from me at any moment.

  My age when my father died might explain why this harsh life lesson stuck fast in my brain. It has long been suspected that the adolescent brain is particularly plastic. This, after all, is a time when growing independence relies on being able to learn from your mistakes. Research has shown that the adolescent brain not only stores memories more vividly than adults, but it is also particularly sensitive to stress, taking longer to recover from emotional setbacks.2 These two factors together explain perfectly why unpredictable danger would have been writ large in my brain from there on in, but even in my most angst-ridden moments I know that the panic I feel is wildly out of proportion to any real threat. Is it helpful that if my husband is away on business and doesn’t text me the second I expect his plane to land I start checking the news for air disasters? Is it good for my son that I jump out of my skin when he goes anywhere near a road, or even looks in the general direction of a hanging window-blind cord? And then I worry that his mother jumping in the air all the time actually makes it more likely that he’ll have some kind of tragic accident—what if I accidentally knock him into the road while rushing to keep him from the edge?

  Then there's the way that I assume the worst based on very little evidence. In the month before I went to Oxford, I sent Elaine Fox several emails explaining this whole project and asking if she would like to be involved in my mission to rewire my brain. I sent her the blurb for the book and a link to one of my previous articles, which was along similar lines to what I was hoping to do with her. And…nothing.

  The logical explanation is that she was busy. But, in my head, it was much more likely that a) she thinks I’m some flake who can be ignored because the book sounds like trash and no one will read it anyway, b) she has read some of my previous articles and thinks I am the worst science journalist in the world, c) she is so disdainful of the whole thing that she has circulated my email to her fellow researchers and is now laughing heartily with them about this stupid journalist who won’t leave her alone.

  And how did I deal with this? Well, I put her number in my phone and chickened out twice about calling her (because she obviously doesn’t want to talk to me). I followed her on Twitter, just in case she's tweeting about the latest offering from the neuro-bollocks school of science writing. And I went around in endless emotional circles ranging from anger (it's a bit rude to just ignore my messages!), to indignant imaginary conversations where I justify my credentials to her, to practicing how cool I would be about it when she told me to get lost. Seriously. It was starting to feel like the time I phoned a boy in the year above me at school (also called Fox, funnily enough) to ask him out. I did it in the end but not before practically giving myself a coronary. (He had a girlfriend, but we became good friends and briefly dated a few years later….)

  And guess what? When I finally did call Elaine Fox, she was lovely. She apologized for not getting back to me and explained that she had been buried under an awful deadline for weeks and was still up to her eyeballs in it, preparing to move her entire lab over the summer. But she thought my project sounded fascinating and agreed to talk properly in a week or so. So what was the point of all that stressing? Weeks spent swirling around in an emotional whirlpool when I could have been doing something useful, like writing the introduction to this book.

  This is the kind of thing I do to myself all the time, and, while it has never really stopped me from pursuing what I want in life, it would be a lot more convenient to bypass the terror and self-flagellation and just get on with it. And, let's face it, it's ridiculous to get uptight about contacting a person who works on treatments for anxiety.

  Of course, it was possible that my neurotic tendencies would have nothing to do with a wonky cognitive bias, so while I was waiting for her to reply, I headed to Elaine Fox's website where there are t
wo tests—one for cognitive bias and a questionnaire to measure a tendency toward optimism or pessimism.3 Just for fun, I asked Jolyon to do it too. Our scores are below.

  Figure 2.1. Optimism/pessimism scores and cognitive bias, as measured on www.rainybrainsunnybrain.com.

  Psychologists measure cognitive biases using a computer-based puzzle called a “dot-probe task.” First, a cross appears in the center of the screen, to give you something to look at. Then, two images flash up for five hundred milliseconds, followed swiftly by a target (which can be anything—an arrow, a dot, whatever). Your job is to press a button on the left or right, depending on where the target (aka probe) has shown up. Research has shown not only that a) people with an anxious temperament are quicker to spot targets that appear on the same side as the angry face (a negative bias) but also that b) people with a negative bias are more prone to anxiety disorders and depression.4

  Figure 2.2. Dot-probe task screens 2 (top) and 3. (Courtesy of Mark Baldwin, McGill University)

  A little bit of background research later and I have the proof: Jolyon is as strange as I am. According to surveys of large numbers of people, an average score on the optimism/pessimism test is 15 out of 24, meaning that the average person is generally slightly optimistic. Jolyon and I are each six points away from the average but in opposite directions. He is unusually positive (hence the risky financial deals) while I am an almost perfect-scoring pessimist.